Friday, December 18, 2009

Or what I mean by this can’t matterThe grave will just be a holeMy self some sense of selfWill be a hole when I am done singingA place where I lost you of course Where I stopped world formingThere would be a politics in this If loss could be felt and not seen

Or it will not be at all no one will beThe land expropriated from the free will notBe because it will not be a partOf history every part of the whole is falseWhich is not spoken by those who can’t speakSo great is what was taken from themNo amount of naming no amount Of cash will replace it.

Everything we pretend to possessWill be taken from us the landWhat is left of the landThree feet above sea levelIn an other’s democracy whoAre "we" fooling

There will no mythologyExcept in what we allowTo melt except in what bloodWill be shed pastoralistBlood soil of whose science fictionWhose practice let this occur

Lays waste to charitas good deedsNeed of mountains commoner treesFor neighbors not to take up armsAnd posit myths of originsA stressed imaginary reduces

Eschaton of this big lapse of judgmentGrand mal of theory who will be judgedInsufficiently civilized barbarityIs on the right side of historyWhen every one is wrong

Who do not interrupt (it) soon enoughSlavery in a storm of progressNo name in history enough Frightened finally by ‘hybridity’Necessity, not contingency, poundsThe shores of us

No boundaries but a disasterWhich universalizes makes differencesAlso more starkThe little ones less Developed simplified by disasterReduced to their breath bigger thanThe lungs Like Kafka’s mouse singer.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

"There’s an inverse relationship between who created the problem and who can afford to save themselves from the problem, and it isn’t only in the Global South. Think about New Orleans. Right? It’s also the South in the North. The people who had resources could drive out of the disaster zone; the people who depended on the state were left on their roofs, a kind of a climate apartheid, in the United States."--Naomi Klein

Fiona Templeton is a poet, and director of the performance group The Relationship. Books include YOU-The City (an intimate Manhattanwide play for an audience of one), Cells of Release, Delirium of Interpretations, Mum in Airdrie, London, and Elements of Performance Art. She lives in New York and London. (www.fionatempleton.org & www.therelationship.org)

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Back in September I was asked the following question in regards to my Wheelhouse Press chapbook, Make Believe: "Many moments in Make Believe are concerned with vision. These poems, among other things, explore vision in various modes, from the spectacle of cable news to the very formation of subjectivity. Do you think of your work as constructing what might be called a poetics of seeing?"

"While I am saying all of this, I wonder how much any of what I’m saying is conveyed by the poem itself. The poem leads, as David Wolach points out, with its ear, but often the senses become cross-wired — confused and ruinous. I dedicated the poem to my friend Gregg Biglieri who is a master of the pun, and of what he calls “negative synaesthesia” after Zukofsky’s Bottom. Flights into nonsense — into language play — seem necessary for the brain and the senses to sync themselves. So in “Berkeley Island” “when dissolves to wind” and a lens “points and chutes” as though to conflate photography with branching. Nonsense, of which poetry obviously has a lot, is meta-political in that it refuses to reduce language use to a representation (whether for a vulgarly conceived common sense or for the sake of communication).

Sunday, December 13, 2009

The withdrawal of thoseGuns and eyes never fairA single one the sunNot shining on us hereNo one lucky enough No dirt brave enough To tuck us inSpeak our names a photographyWorn thin with historyA kind of stench our stories leakA kind of lack our eyes wantWhen meaning won’tBe strained.

The starlight on their eyesIt is sometimesAnd we are themDisastered because our voicesMuffle in the dinOf voices given up controlOf what they mean Bogged down by the deadAnd having seen And not heardToo much where we wakeWe supposedly wake.